VARIOUS ECSTASIES

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
- Ray Bradbury

Thursday, June 30, 2005

IT'S ALL FOR SALE!

Hustling on K Street: Under the Republicans, it's all for sale...

By Jonathan ChaitL.A. Times

When faced with evidence of corruption and sleaze by such Republican stalwarts as Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, conservatives have responded in three ways.The first is to deny the accusations altogether. The second is to concede them, but insist the rot is confined to a few bad apples. The third, favored by the most independent-minded conservatives, is to declare that power has made Republicans just as corrupt as Democrats. The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson, articulating this latter response, wrote that the "closed, parasitic culture of convenience — with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort and ideological cover stories — is as essential to the way Republican Washington works, ten years after the [Republican] Revolution, as ever it was to Democratic Washington."Sorry, but this won't do either. The influence of corporate lobbyists over government is not just as bad under the GOP as it ever was under Democrats. It's far worse.A remarkable report by Jeffrey Birnbaum of the Washington Post shows that George W. Bush's presidency has ushered in a golden age for K Street lobbyists. Over the last five years, the number of registered lobbyists in the nation's capital has more than doubled. Starting salaries for lobbyists have shot up from $200,000 to $300,000, and the fees charged by some have doubled.

Birnbaum cited Hewlett-Packard, which nearly doubled its lobbying expenditures to $734,000, and won tax breaks worth millions. As HP's top lobbyist told Birnbaum, "We're trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House." Business is booming because there seemingly are no limits to what Republicans are willing to do on behalf of their constituents. Last summer, Bush signed a corporate tax bill that amounted to a series of naked giveaways. (One lobbyist involved confessed that the bill amounted to "a new level of sleaze.") The Post's Thomas Edsall reported that one powerful tax lobbyist collected a bushel of breaks for his clients and collected $8.69 million in fees for that one bill. No doubt it was money well spent.

Virtually every element of the Republican agenda has the effect — I suspect the intent, but I can't prove that — of enriching special interests. Bush has enacted five tax cuts, a Medicare prescription drug bill stuffed with billions in corporate subsidies, tort reform, bankruptcy restrictions, various tariffs and regulatory rollbacks enacted by administration appointees who frequently oversee the industries they once represented. How is this any different than the arrangement that prevailed when Democrats controlled Washington? The Democratic agenda often ran directly against the interests of K Street. When President Clinton in 1993 raised taxes on the rich and clamped down on spending, there were no economic interests who stood to benefit. His healthcare plan benefited a few companies and enraged many more, who waged a successful fight to kill it. Only his passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement engendered much lobbying support, and even that provoked significant opposition from unions and some corporations that stood to lose from free trade.

Democrats, of course, are plenty compromised by their constituent interest groups. The difference is that their interest groups often disagree. Democrats receive support from business as well as labor, consumer groups, environmentalists and so on. Some Democrats are tools of business, others are tools of labor. But there's enough internal disagreement that the party is at least capable of trying to act in the broader interest.

Republicans, on the other hand, have no economic constituency besides business. As a result, the GOP has been completely captured by its component interests. Under previous GOP presidents, there was some shame attached to blatant corporate giveaways. But Republicans such as Bush, DeLay, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist have a new ethos of total partisan warfare, in which the business lobby is their ironclad ally. This ethos is emblemized by the "K Street Project," a GOP effort to force lobbying firms to donate to and hire Republicans exclusively. The party expects total loyalty from K Street, and it gives it in return. The old, cozy bipartisan lobbying culture that prevailed when Democrats held power was sleazy enough. But those Democrats never contemplated anything like this.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

INTERNET CONNECTIVITY PROBLEMS

I haven't had any internet service for the last couple of days! Arrrrrgh!

I had a nice 48th birthday today. As a Father's Day/birthday present I received a Selmer/Bundy clarinet, made of resonite, very high quality, and plays nicely. The kids got me three comedy DVDs, "BASEketball", "Anchorman" and "So I Married An Axe Murderer". My wonderful spouse bought me a copy of Todd Rundgren's "Something/Anything?" CD. We all went out for breakfast this morning with my parents, and then had birthday cake this evening. I thanked my kids for only putting nine candles on the cake. It was probably some comment on their part as to my maturity level, but what the heck! I extinguished all the candles with one mighty gust of hot air! Heh!

I'l be back in the saddle soon, and I'll be shopping for a new picture service. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions!

Monday, June 27, 2005

MISSING PICTURES?

When you come to this site, do you no longer see pictures? I'm trying to figure out if freefilehosting.net has gone belly-up or what. Please let me know! Thanks.

I've been fairly busy the past few days helping my parents clean out some things from their attic. My dad has an antique tool collection which includes about 250 wood-working planes, over 100 levels, dozens of hand drills, etc. He is no longer able to climb the stairs to the attic, so I have been doing a lot of the lifting and transporting of items. Dad is in the process of selling his collection to a friend who lives about 60 miles from here, and the friend isn't in the greatest of health either... so he is boxing up items, and I'm moving them. It has made for good physical exercise!

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

THE MONTY PYTHON SCHOOL OF LEADERSHIP!

Snave's note: I find the following article interesting. It is not what I would call objective, but I tend to agree with most of it.

Gene LyonsArkansas Democrat-Gazette06-01-05

With respect to the Bush administration's "war on terror," our administration appears to have entered the Monty Python stage of debate, where extreme silliness trumps all competing values. I refer to the inspired scene in "Life of Brian" in which a cabal of toga-clad revolutionaries styling itself the "Judean People's Liberation Front" meets in a Roman coliseum to argue strategy.

It's time to confront the real enemy. Poor Brian, the amiable dunce who keeps being mistaken for the messiah, obligingly shouts an anti-Roman slogan, only to be coolly informed that the real enemy is, in fact, the "People's Liberation Front of Judea."

As a send-up of 1960's left-wing factionalism, it's priceless.

So now we're doing it all over again, except this time the crackpot radicals appear to be the White House and its allies. (It doesn't help that so many of the administration's principal figures appear to have been driven bonkers by Jane Fonda-style radicals during the Vietnam era.) Instead, the administration spent last week attacking not Al Qaeda or Iraqi insurgents, but the real enemy: Newsweek magazine and pusillanimous Americans who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq to begin with.

Washington Post columnist Terry Neal found it "mind-boggling listening to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who used information from a now discredited source known as 'Curveball' to make the case for war against Iraq, calling out Newsweek: 'Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations.'

"It was almost as if the Newsweek fiasco had occurred in a vacuum, or in an alternate reality, where the Iraq war, fought over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, had never occurred."

Meanwhile, the same newspaper's estimable Walter Pincus, in a story unaccountably buried on page A26, reported that back before the war, both the CIA and German intelligence sources handling "Curveball" warned that the Iraqi defector was at best "problematical." Nothing he said could be confirmed. He was eventually determined to be a fabricator peddling tall tales.Contrary to the White House line that the president was misled by poor intelligence, Pincus said that "many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about (Saddam) Hussein's alleged weapons programs."

Elsewhere in the news, The New York Times broke yet another story about an under-trained and poorly supervised group of soldiers who allegedly decorated their tent with a Confederate flag and called themselves the "Testosterone Gang," systematically beating and torturing prisoners to death at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Even worse, Army investigators believe, some victims were innocent civilians caught up in the chaos of war. It's estimated that 85 percent of Bagram detainees were released without charges.

Atrocities happen in all wars. Two things, however, make the reported American transgressions at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base particularly appalling: first, the way they appear to confirm everything Islamist propagandists say about the "crusaders' contempt for Islam"; second, that they proceeded directly from the administration's country club tough-guy rhetoric.

Classic psychology experiments have repeatedly shown that, absent stringent discipline among their captors, isolated groups rendered helpless and defined as the "other" often fall prey to sadism and brutality--a phenomenon hardly unknown to U.S. military authorities. Instead of proper training, however, inexperienced American Reservists were encouraged to treat the captives as "terrorists" to whom the president naively determined the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

In effect, if not intent, George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who signed off on memos validating torture for "enemy combatants," declared open season on detainees.

Then there was the story of former NFL star Pat Tillman, a genuine American hero who gave up a $4.5 million contract to defend his country after 9/11. After he was killed by his own troops in a tragic combat blunder on a mountainside in Afghanistan, the Pentagon hid the actual circumstances of his death from his own family for many weeks, seemingly fearful that the facts would render his sacrifice meaningless.

"They realized," Tillman's embittered father told The Washington Post, "that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

With all due respect, I think the elder Tillman and the Pentagon are both mistaken. His son is no less a hero for the tragic circumstances of his death, and most Americans are grown up enough to handle the truth. Hardly anybody opposed the mission into Afghanistan, and few do today.

What they can't handle, and what's forcing the Bush administration and its supporters into increasingly absurd postures, is their growing awareness of the comprehensive disaster caused by their misguided obsession with Iraq and the propaganda campaign that got us there.

BEFORE AND AFTER

BLOGGER ATE MY MASTERPIECE!!

I located around 40 Bush flip-flops, and there are way more that have been documented. I spent about an hour compiling a list of 43 of them, and then Blogger and my computer ganged up on me and ate the post before I could publish it. So... I'll try again during the next day or two. In the meantime, enjoy the above cartoon!

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

COULD IT BE? ANOTHER G.O.P....

Snave's note: This was just in fun, mind you! 8-)> That is, I had lots of fun highlighting certain phrases below in bold and adding the pictures.

The Associated PressJune 21, 2005

WASHINGTON - Reversing field after a meeting with President Bush,Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he will continue pushing for a floor vote on John R. Bolton for U.N. ambassador. Frist switched his positionafter initially saying Tuesday that negotiations with Democrats to get a vote on Bolton had been exhausted.

Talking to reporters in the White House driveway after he joined other GOP lawmakers for a luncheon with Bush, Frist said: "The president made it very clear that he expects an up-or-down vote."

Just about two hours earlier, Frist said he wouldn't schedule another vote on Bolton's nominationand said that Bush must decide the next move. Frist, R-Tenn., had said there was nothing further he could do to break a Democratic stalemate with the Bush White House over Bolton, an outspoken conservative who, opponents argue, would undermine U.S. interests at the world body.

But he changed his tuneafter talking to Bush.

Frist's abrupt public turnaboutunderscored the political pressures that the long-running battle over Bolton have heaped upon Frist and Bush.

Six months into his final term in office, Bush is struggling to avoid the perception of a weakened lame duck at a time when his proposal for revamping Social Security has made little progress and some lawmakers are calling for troop withdrawals from Iraq. Frist has lost control of the Republican-run Senate in recent weeksin fights over Bush's judicial appointments and earlier attempts to confirm Bolton.

Describing his talk with Bush, Frist said: "The decision in talking to the president is that he strongly supports John Bolton, as we know, and he asked that we continue to work. And we'll continue to work."

"It's not dead," he said. "It is going to require some continued talking and discussion."Frist, however, also said that some Democrats, led by Sens. Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden, had "locked down."

"We'll continue to work to get an up-or-down vote for John Bolton over the coming days, possibly weeks," he said.

Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli had greeted Frist's initial announcement with a declaration that Democrats had left Bolton "hanging in the wind."

THOSE WHO LOVE THE CONSTITUTION, BEWARE! BUSH STILL WANTS TO TINKER WITH IT...

By Alex Johnson, ReporterMSNBCJune 21, 2005

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Reviving a major plank of his re-election campaign, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Tuesday.

The president’s address to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention — the fourth year in a row he has spoken to the conservative evangelical gathering — was crafted to rally the social religious conservatives who make up a crucial part of Bush’s governing coalition. He restated his commitment to issues dear to conservatives’ hearts, notably his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and research on human embryonic stem cells — a stance he calls the “culture of life.”

“We will continue to build a culture of life in America, and America will be better off for it,” Bush said by satellite hookup from the White House.

advertisementdocument.write('Bush’s remarks were similar to those he made last year, when he said he would work to uphold marriage as he sought to solidify his religious conservative base ahead of the November election. He thanked the 11,077 “messengers” who made the trek to Nashville this year for defending “the values that carry a moral society, for ... defending the family and the sacred institution of marriage.”

But the message has extra resonance this year. The president’s ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is being challenged in Congress, even by some in his own Republican Party, and the likelihood of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s imminent retirement promises a free-swinging ideological battle in the Senate.

Carefully worded appealIn a nod to polling data that suggest Americans strongly support embryonic stem cell research, Bush sought to focus the debate on theoretical pitfalls should such science be perfected. Not once did he use the words “stem cell” or “embryos.”Instead, the president cast his position as standing in the way of “cloning” — which some scientists say could be a realistic result of the research — and “the creation of life only to destroy it.”

The Southern Baptist Convention strongly condemns homosexuality, and the president’s remarks were greeted with sustained applause. Gay rights activists were organizing a rally for Wednesday morning at the Nashville Public Library to protest the convention's preaching on gays and lesbians.

Bush’s speech was also in keeping with the tone of urgency suffusing the conference, where the Rev. Bobby Welch, president of the convention, has challenged church leaders to renew their commitment to social engagement and evangelism, which Welch said was a critical test of the church’s credibility.

Bush echoed that call, sounding themes in a recent declaration by the National Association of Evangelicals urging more attention to poverty, homelessness and economic disruption.“We must help the poor, the sick and those who hurt,” he said.

Although a sizable minority of evangelical Christians — estimated at 20 percent to 40 percent — say they are politically moderate or Democratic, the SBC has been led by socially conservative leaders since they engineered a takeover of the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination in 1979. At one point during a floor debate Tuesday, Welch had to remind messengers to remain civil.

Schools resolution unlikelyThe conservatives’ primary issues have been gay and lesbian rights and what they see as moral decay in the public schools, a topic that has again created controversy at the convention’s annual gathering.

But the convention was unlikely to consider resolutions calling on Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. The convention’s resolutions committee was considering two non-binding resolutions urging parents to investigate whether their local school promoted homosexuality and to pull their children out of classes if it did, but the panel killed a similar resolution last year, and Welch told MSNBC.com last week that he thought Christians should remain in public schools to promote change from within.

Even so, there was a strong sense that “the modern educational system in America is a mess,” as the Rev. Jerry Vines of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., a leading social conservative figure in Southern Baptist circles, said in an address at the convention’s Pastors Conference.

“In modern education in America, we have dethroned God, and we have deified man,” Vines said. “You cannot satisfy the human soul with mere education.”

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE!

Monday, June 20, 2005

SNAVE'S TOP 40 ALBUMS 1985-2005

SPIN Magazine's new issue contains a list of what they deem to be the Top 100 albums from the 1985-2005 time frame. J.Marquis at "Are We There Yet" posted a wonderful list, and he was somehow able to keep his at a Top Ten! J., how were you able to do that? Heh! Phil from "The Bottom Line" posted a good list of 20. I posted a list there too, but I have already had to revise and expand it a couple of times... so this list is "official"!

It's a list of what I have been most passionate about musically for the past twenty years. Here is my Top 40:

About Me

I am a native eastern Oregonian, and have lived here 47 of my 59 years. I left at 20, but was back by age 32 to be near my parents to help them in times of need. I don't fit in politically here because I view things from a decidedly left wing perspective... but that's o.k. because I love the people, I love the area and for the most part I like living here. I enjoy family time, listening to music, reading books, traveling, bird watching, hiking, backpacking, watching movies, keeping up on politics, watching sports, sitting at the computer so much I get sores on my ass, and playing music... if you need a band for your party or celebration, let me know; I play keyboards and sing for a rock and roll band, and we do mostly "classic rock". (I also like to play guitar and bass and other instruments, but those are for my private enjoyment only!) I am mainly an agnostic/skeptic, but would consider myself spiritual. I work in schools and in clinical settings as a speech/language therapist. It is enjoyable work and it pays some of the bills. I have a rather unpredictable sense of humor, which can get me in trouble at times, but hey, is life worth living without laughter? I think not!